The casualty estimates for the Afghan war run as high as 220,000. Three hundred if you count the fighting in Pakistan.

These are not subjects we care to think about in the West at this point for obvious reasons.

The war achieved nothing, there was never any chance that it would achieve anything. The whole exercise was one of zombie madness and blank futility..

The Unites States deliberately destabilised Afghanistan beginning in the middle 1970s. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a long term US policy goal.

The Americans wanted to “give the Soviet Union their own Vietnam war.”

A futile war of attrition that would sap their will and demoralise them . The policy was pretty cynical, but it was also cunning and intelligent. The plot was successful..

The troubling question therefore is , how did the US transition from cynically embroiling the Soviets in Afghanistan to being so stupid as to then inflict the same futile war upon themselves barely a decade after the Russian departure?

How could the Americans possibly be so stupid?

Is it possible?

Mullah Omar in Death.

After many years of false alarms and mistaken reports it has now been confirmed by the Afghan Taliban that the titular head of the Afghan Taliban Mullah Omar is dead. Yesterday the BBC reported the Afghan Government claim that Omar died two years ago in a Pakistan hospital.
Mullah Omar was the leader of the Taliban Government that ruled almost all of Afghanistan between 1996 and late 2001.
The Taliban rose to power due to the backing of Pakistan, who belatedly realised that Gulbuddin Hekmatyer was a maniac who could never form a stable government and switched their allegiance to the deeply parochial Kandahar based Taliban movement.
It was claimed that Mullah Omar only once traveled to Kabul, it is entirely possible that Mullah Omar had never even heard of New York city before the 911 attack.
The Taliban were a wretched Government, not that it had any bearing on what happened.

The group conducted a major massacre in Mazar e Sharif in 1998 that had deeply sectarian overtones, involved thousands of deaths and brought the Taliban to the brink of war with Iran after their fighters killed Iranian Diplomats stationed in the city.
The Taliban lacked respect for the diverse social traditions of the Afghan people, they sought to impose the values of provincial Kandahar upon Kabul and the rest of an extremely diverse nation.
They appear to have been a slight improvement on the previous Government of chaotic and brutal warlords.
The United States decided to invade Afghanistan long before 911, the Taliban who clearly had no involvement whatsoever on the attack, offered to hand bin laden over to the Americans if they produced evidence of his involvement.

The attack on Afghanistan was inevitable and there was nothing the Taliban could do to prevent it.
In November 2001 the Taliban Government collapsed and the key figures in the movement fled to Pakistan or remote areas.
Mullah Omar made only one filmed public appearance even when the leader of Afghanistan. After 2001 Mullah Omar disappeared completely and became completely irrelevant long before his death.
An individual named Mullah Akhtar Mansoor has been named as Omar’s replacement as Taliban chief.
The Taliban have an ethos, they do not need a leader. The Taliban are simply hundreds of very loosely co-ordinated different local groups of largely Pashtun fighters scattered widely throughout Afghanistan.
The Taliban inflicted terrible losses upon the occupation force, took heavy casualties and now that the foreign troops have almost entirely left it is as if the entire war never happened.

Afghanistan is returned to it’s former place on “things we don’t like to talk about” list no mention is made of the fact that in twelve or so years of occupation nothing whatsoever was achieved.

The Taliban, for better or worse represent the most powerful faction with the Afghan Pashtun community, the largest single ethnic group.

The Afghan and Pakistani Taliban.

The Afghan Taliban should not be confused with the Pakistan Taliban, who are better described as al Qaeda in Pakistan, a CIA/MI/Mossad/RAW backed terror group the West and allied nations used to destablise Pakistan and make the Afghan Taliban appear to be a terror group which has never really been the case other than the “Haqqani network” which has been widely claimed to be a CIA proxy. The conflation of the two groups made the idea that the “War on terror” was being fought in Afghanistan credible. It was nonsense.

The story is about the Peshawar massacre of December 2014. The Afghan Taliban have no involvement in this event or any other similar events.
The Taliban have proven through their history of narrow mindedness and intolerance that they are not a sustainable national government in Afghanistan.

The solution for Afghanistan would appear to be a regional based federalist system with a weak federal Government delegating many powers to regional groups.

Thanks Butlin cat. The Newsweek story is very interesting. It is highly unlikely that the place or cause of death will ever be known. An Afghan death is beneficial to the Mullah Omar and Taliban legend, death in Pakistan would point in uncomfortable directions. I have no idea what happened to the man but there were no signs of Mullah Omar nor any of the other senior Taliban leaders even being in Afghanistan at all after the fall of the Government in late 2001. This is not unusual, the same thing happened during the fight against the Soviet forces, the commanders were almost all based in Pakistan. This seems to be the motivation for the US drone attacks in Pakistan the Americans knew from experience that if they allowed Pakistan to be used as a sanctuary, a safe rear area, they would have no chance of winning the war. Obviously the whole idea of winning in Afghanistan was a complete delusion on day one. Thanks for the link.